Blogging Roller

Roller 0.9.5 is available for download at SourceForge. This new Roller release includes enhancements for XHTML support, bookmark management, database support for PostgreSQL and HSQL-DB, and some bug fixes. Thanks to new Roller contributors Lance Lavandowska, Matt Raible, Simon Stewart for their work on this release. New features:

• Support for XHTML and CSS in generated weblog pages (Matt)
• Better Page URLs in the Navigation Bar Tag and PageServlet (Lance)
• Support for HSQL and PostgreSQL databases (Lance and Simon)
• Export feature for backing up website (Dave)
• Bookmark import by file-upload of OPML file (Dave)
• Multiple bookmark move and delete on edit-bookmark page (Dave)
• Some bug fixes

Mozilla is highly customizable and offers a number of user options, while Netscape forces users to accept many features and functions they probably don't want while removing some they probably do. [eWeek - Netscape 7.0 Shrivels Under Mozilla's Shadow]

"Unless [Netscape parent company] AOL makes a move soon, Netscape may find itself battling Opera for the last 1 percent to 2 percent of the market." ... "The browser war is in fact a massacre" [ WinFormant - New Netscape, Mozilla Browsers No Match for IE]

...while Mozilla swells

"We've not seen any improvement in the current IT spending environment. In fact, some would say it might actually be worsening," Chief Financial Officer Steve McGowan said during a conference call with financial analysts. [CNET - IT outlook darkens Sun's revenue view]

Ovum software analyst Bola Rotibi said BEA's biggest problem remains its identity. The company calls itself an "application infrastructure" company - offering web services development environment, portal and integration software atop an application server. To many, though, it is still primarily known as an application server company. [The Register - Developer army not on the way for BEA]

Apparently, the hordes of VB programmers that BEA expected to run screaming from VB.NET are not showing up on BEA's doorstep. By painting itself as an applications company, BEA hopes to survive the commoditization of the app server business. Seems like you can't just sell development tools and infrastructure anymore, you've got to sell applications or better yet: complete customer solutions.

Jeff Duska suggests the following for Roller:

* a much better editor. The current edit is too simple.
* How do you change your password?
* A way to upload templates 

We do need a better editor, even if it is only for IE. Maybe Russell Beattie will write a nice editor applet that we can use. Currently, there is no way for a user to change his/her password. And currently, the only ways to upload templates are by cut-and-pasting into Roller.

Jeff: If you use the Roller $macros.showEntryPermalink() in your day template, you'll get a permalink for each weblog entry.

I was hoping to release Roller 0.9.5 tonight, but there were some distractions. My little two month old decided that he was not going to take a bottle tonight while Mom is out. Unfortunately, the only way he could tell me this was by emitting incredibly loud and high pitched screams during the whole bottle session, falling asleep for 15 mintues, and then repeating the process. With the help of some special equipment (earplugs) and after three failed attempts I was finally able to convince little Leo to drink his bottle. These unexpected technical issues can really impact software development timelines.

SnipSnap is Java-based weblog and wiki software, it is currently licensed under the GPL but may go commercial at some point. The architecture and weblog-wiki synthesis looks interesting.

Cafe au Lait summarizes the new feature list as follows:

    * Pop-up Javadoc documentation
    * Live parsing and error marking
    * Drag and drop support (JDK 1.4.1 only on Windows)
    * Close buttons on tabs

Also: support for Servlet 2.3/JSP 1.2 is now built-in. Unfortunately, the GUI builder still lacks support for two-way-editing.

The solution, according to [Sun Chief Engineer] Gingell, is simple. "Despite popular belief, our business has always been about solving customer problems by building solutions on top of fairly standard things and just doing a better job of it than our competitors. SPARC is an IEEE standard. Unix isn't substantially different from one version to the next. We just did it better and faster than anybody else. When it comes to Java, there's no reason we can't do the same." [ZDNet: Sun bets its future on Java]

In case Mike gets on me about using WebWork, I think I'm going to stick with Struts because of the resume enhancing potential, but I do have to say that WebWork makes a bit more sense to me than Struts. Niel via Rebelutionary via Russell

Personally, I think Niel should use Webwork in MiniBlog so that we can see how MVC is supposed to be done. If not, he should just come on over to the dark side and work on Roller ;-)

However, I do understand why a company might pick the more popular of what appear to be two equivalent technologies. The more popular technology will have more books on the shelf, more trained developers, more momentum, and more chance of long term improvement.

Bobby Woolf gave a fun and edutaining talk on services layer architecture at the Triangle JUG meeting tonight. The title was Patterns for Services Using EJB, but thankfully the talk did not really focus on EJB. Instead Bobby cracked a lot of jokes at Microsoft's expense, dropped Martin Fowler's name a few too many times, and talked about the history of and reasoning behind the layered architectures of the past and the relatively new services layer architectures of today.

Roller uses a service layer architecture, by the way. The Roller Business Tier interfaces (in org.roller.model) constitute the services layer.

Steve Anglin speculates about the possibility of a HP-BEA-Borland merger, a Sun-Dell union, and merger mania in the Java industry. [Steve Anglin's weblog]

The site that accompanies The Java Developers Almanac is the greatest Java sample code site around. As such, it's probably the greatest reference site. I suggest buying the book. This looks like what the Java Cookbook should have been.[paradox1x]

Matt Raible describes how to create a private password-protected weblog in Roller [Raible Designs]

Borland intends to be a sort of Switzerland of development tools, supporting the two major programming models, the Java and Microsoft.Net development camps. [CNET] Does CNET mean to imply that Microsoft's $25 million investment was Nazi Gold? And just what is a "development camp" anyway?

Rickard �berg has posted some interesting random thoughts on blog syndication, aggregation, and blogging's role in the Java community.

Introductory article on Castor JDO on IBM developerWorks written by Bruce Snyder of the Castor team.

Blogging Roller is now running on Roller 0.9.5-alpha thanks to a nice little 0.9.4 to 0.9.5 database migration script written by Lance Lavandowska. In other news: Lance just committed in his first cut of file upload for Roller. This new feature should make it easier to upload images for use in Roller weblog entries.

I wonder when that RSS feed repair-man is going to show up? Blogging Roller has been "awaiting repair" for quite some time. Hmm... maybe I ought to fix it myself. Apparently, I only need to add a polling element.

I think Russell has some good points in his rants about JSP tag libs. One of the design goals of JSP tag libraries was to help get code off the page - to separate business logic from presentation. If you start doing general purpose programming with JSP tags you are going to end up with the same sort of mess you would have with lots of Java JSP scriplets all over your page.

But I think Russell is wrong about JSP tag library portability. There are plenty of portable JSP tag libs out there from open source projects and payware products alike. There is no reason to use a tag lib that will tie you to one app server. However, the learning curve involved in mastering a tag lib can be a drag on developer portability.

Russell, I think you are really ranting about JSP in general not just JSP tag libs. Velocity might be a better choice for you (and for me), but I believe that if you are going to be using JSP then you should be using JSP tag libraries as well. With some forethought you can avoid writing lots of general purpose programming logic using tags. Your tagless JSP code in MiniBlog and SimpleWeb looks pretty nice, but I have seen what JSP code-on-page can degenerate into and it is not pleasant.